Finnish Theatre Research Articles

Editorial

Editorial

Theatre translation

The article analyses the textual changes that occur in the process of staging a performance based on a translated text. Drawing on Morini’s four types of theatre translation, namely the interlingual, intralingual, intersemiotic, and intrasemiotic aspects of theatre translation (emerging from Jakobson’s classification of translation), the article focuses on the differences between the translated text and the text spoken on the stage through the analysis of the Slovene performance of Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe by the Finnish author Kristian Smeds, translated into Slovene by Julija Potrč Šavli. The play, directed by the Finnish theatre director Jari Juutinen, was performed at the Slovene theatre Slovensko ljudsko gledališče Celje by the Slovene actress Maša Grošelj. As the author of the article participated in staging this play as a language consultant, the article provides an insight into the process, and reveals why and how the changes to the text occurred. As the analyses of the written and staged texts show, the majority of the textual changes were introduced by various agents involved in the production of the play, while some were also due to the multimodal interactions between different theatre modes (speech, scenography, sound, light, props, etc.).

“Shakespeare is a Finnish national poet:” Developing Finnish Shakespeare Scholarship from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century

In this article, I will take up the idea of “origins” as it pertains to Finnish Shakespeare during Finland’s time as an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia from 1809-1917. While not technically the beginning of Shakespearean performances, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the beginning of the rhetorical use of Shakespeare in public discourse used to establish cultural sovereignty distinct from Sweden and Russia. Beginning with a brief overview of Shakespearean mentions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I will analyse the public discourse found in Finnish literary journals and newspaper articles in the 1810’s and 20’s. Following an analysis of J. F. Lagervall’s 1834 Ruunulinna, I will then briefly track how shifting attitudes towards translations such as those found in J. V. Snellman’s writings influenced the emerging Finnish literary and theatre tradition, most notably with Kaarlo Slöör and Paavo Cajendar’s Shakespeare translations and the establishment of the Finnish Theatre in 1871. Finally, an analysis of Juhani Aho’s untranslated essay in Gollancz’ 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare will highlight the legacy of prior Finnish Shakespearean traditions, while also highlighting the limits of translation. Ultimately, I suggest that Shakespeare was appropriated early on as an accessible figure of resistance in the face of Swedish linguistic supremacy and the increasing threat of Russian assimilation and oppression.

On the optimal level of theatre subsidies

This article examines public subsidies and ticket pricing in Finnish theatre institutions by using the principal-agent model. The model follows the ideas presented by Prieto-Rodríguez and Fernández-Blanko (2006) in their article on the British museum sector. The idea of this article is to test how well their theoretical model is in line with the data on Finnish theatres. The aim of this paper to justify the high share of public subsidies to theatre sector and to show that ticket pricing should be in the inelastic segment on the demand schedule. The data on Finnish theatres covers years 2007 – 2011 with 58 theatres subsidised by the law, including the Finnish National Opera. The results of the empirical examination show that the demand of theatre services is price inelastic. According to the results, an increase in the number of visitors increases also optimal subsidies but less than proportionally indicating that the share of public subsidies should be lower in larger towns where the potential for theatre visits is higher due to a larger population. The article argues that even though using economic approaches in examining arts and culture is not unproblematic, they should be used and further developed.

Platformed intimacies: Professional belonging on social media

This article explores how social media presence and platform engagements inform and affect creative workers’ sense of professional agency and craft. Focusing on Finnish theatre, film and TV actors’ perceptions of their social media interactions, the article proposes the concept of platformed intimacy to capture the simultaneous importance and ambivalence of mobile attachments that characterise actors’ platformed lives. The research participants consisted of 15 freelancers and theatre employees, aged between 29 and 64 years. The analysis was based on the diary-interview method and close reading. In this article, we suggest that to understand the complexities involved in creative workers’ presence on social media platforms, it is important to broaden the investigation from self-promotion to questions of professional identities and communities. The concept of platformed intimacy captures how actors experience social network sites and apps, such as Instagram and Facebook, as ‘grey areas’ in which they deal with the frequent uncertainty about the meaning of social media visibility for their employability and future collaborations. For actors in our study, social media presence is intimately entangled with their sense of professionalism and desire of to belong to a professional community of peers. As such it articulates senses of proximity and reciprocity as well as feelings of discomfort and anxiety.

Creating a “Lapp” Character

This article explores the ways in which the Sámi were represented in the early years of established theatre in Finland, starting with the Finnish Theatre (Suomalainen Teatteri) in 1872 and its successor the Finnish National Theatre (Suomen kansallisteatteri), 1902. Particular attention is paid to the role of costumes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their designs often involving the consultation of ethnographers, archaeologists, historians and visual artists. The widest archival evidence for this study consists of theatre photographs and plays, supported by contemporary publications and newspaper articles. Textual sources were augmented by the study of Sámi garments. By identifying and analysing the relevant plays, related stage photographs and newspaper reviews, it becomes clear that recurrent ways developed for representing Sámi people on the stage. This development of “Lapp” characters was established through costume in conspicuous ways, with the exaggeration of particular features of Sámi dress leading to a recognizable trope of the “Lapp” costume.

Karjala kulttuurisena traumana Suomen teatterissa


 
 
 Karelia as a cultural trauma in Finnish theatre
 This article asks how Finnish-language theatre and plays have depicted ceded Karelia and reflected the feelings of the Karelian diaspora. The theatrical art- form is understood as a dialogue between narratives intended for the commu- nity and the reception they receive from them. The article examines the ways in which theatre participated in dealing with the cultural trauma of the diaspora. The changing political climate in Finland and Russia, as well as the ambivalent relationships of the post-war Karelian generations with the traumatic narrative of the older generation, allows three periods to be distinguished: 1. The stage of harmony, longing and nostalgic drama (1940–1965), when the focus was mainly on lost era; 2. The phase of conflicting Karelian orientations (1965–1990), when the influence of the Soviet Union on public debate and interpretations of history was at its strongest; and 3. The stage of consolidation of the Karelian narrative (1990–2020), when epic theatre covering all the war years was performed in Fin- land dealing with forced departure and adaptation, now from the perspective of the evacuees’ own experience and Finnish interpretation of history.
 
 

From Guest-Workers to Settlers

Focusing on theatre, the article reveals how issues regarding Sweden-Finnish migrants’ agency and representation became politicised, problematised and reworked in the beginning of the 1970s. In the popular emotional representation of the early 1970s’ Finnish theatre, the migrant worker was seen as a tragic human casualty of inhuman capitalism. The representation was emotionally relevant both to the radical left with its strong anti-capitalist sentiments and to the rural population in northern and eastern Finland that had been affected by structural change and migration. The tragic migrant characters and the pessimistic view of migration, predominant in Finnish drama, was problematised by the Finnish immigrants to Sweden who did not want to be victimised as exploited guest-workers oppressed by capitalism. As the Sweden-Finnish institutions strengthened in the beginning of the 1970s, active cultural politics sought to increase the immigrants’ agency and their participation in society, politics and culture. It was crucial to replace the negative representation of a passive and resigned guest-worker with a positive image of an active and sociable settler. Mirroring a larger shift in the more nuanced understanding of migration processes and in the Swedish minority politics, the new and positive self-representation was to evolve from community-based cultural activity. The local Sweden-Finnish societies were encouraged to launch spontaneous cultural creation, including collective performances based on their everyday migrant experiences.

Motherless Girls and the Orphan Myth in the Making of Nation: The Gendered Representation of a Nation in the Repertoire of the Finnish Theatre Company, 1872–76

In this article, I argue that orphanhood and motherlessness as presented in drama reinforce the gendered representations used in nationalist processes. I examine the plays presented by the Finnish Theatre Company (founded by the Finnish nationalists in 1872) in 1872–76 and analyse their contribution to the gendering of the nation. In Finland, the idea of collective nationality was established during the nineteenth century by defining an ideal ‘Finnishness’ and creating ‘national’ imagery, especially through the arts. One of the most enduring representations was the embodiment of Finland, the Finnish Maid. As the theatre was one of the nationalist’s central institutions, I argue that it had a strong role in producing imagery for their uses, and that its early repertoire reinforced the gendered representation of the nation, emphasising youth and virginity as its main features. The study’s focus is on orphanhood and motherlessness as vehicles for intensifying the feminine representation of nationality. The ubiquity of orphan girl characters and the absence of mothers emphasise the sexual metaphor of a defenceless virgin, the notions of ‘true’ origin and the nuclear family as a scale model of the nation. Simultaneously the representations naturalise the gender categorisations established in the Western cultures during the nineteenth century.

Cultural Trauma of the Civil War of 1918 Staged and Commemorated in Finland

The Centennial of one of the cruelest of European civil wars fought in Finland between the Reds and the Whites from January to May 1918 has evoked a spectrum of theatre productions illustrating variations of styles and approaches on the events. The turn in the treatment of this cultural trauma occurred with the interpretations and narrative perspectives that were fixed in the 1960s, when an understanding for the defeated Red side was expressed in historiography, literature and theatre. Since that, the last six decades the Finnish theatre and public discourse on the Civil War have been dominated by the Red narrative as the memory of the 1918 Civil War provided an important part in the new identity politics for the 1969 generation. Since the 1980’s the topic was mostly put aside so that before the 2018 revivals of the Civil War topic, the productions seem to have been reactions by the artists confronting the developments at the end of the Cold War. Some theatrical events can even be tied to the cultural trauma of the 1969 left evoked by the collapse of the socialist block. The Centennial productions repeated the Red narrative but they also provided more balanced interpretationson the tragic events.

The Pleasures of Recognition: Two Recent Finnish Appropriations of Romeo and Juliet

ABSTRACTThis essay examines two Finnish appropriations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Jari Juutinen’s monologue Juliet, Juliet! (2007) and Lauri Sipari and Liisa Urpelainen’s play for two characters, Romeo vs. Juliet (2014). Both plays rewrite the story, Juutinen by layering it onto a real life event, where a Finnish woman murdered her husband and children after she got into debt; and Sipari and Urpelainen by imagining what might have happened had Romeo and Juliet made it to Mantua and got married. Both plays are also interested in the cultural resonances of Shakespeare’s original language, juxtaposing textual allusions to (Finnish translations of) Shakespeare’s original with modern text, sometimes for deliberately jarring, but also comic, effects. Both plays also question the modern-day implications of star-crossed love and tragic catharsis, and their use in contemporary Finnish theatre. The essay adds to our knowledge of Shakespearean afterlives, showing how recent Finnish writers have responded to this most canonical of plays.

Poor Theatre, Rich Theatre

The article analyzes two Finnish theatre adaptations of Fanny och Alexander, by Ingmar Bergman, and Rauta-aika, by Paavo Haavikko, premiered in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The key question is, how the two works brought the filmic originals’ wealth of material to theatrically manageable proportions, and how the themes of poverty and prosperity were developed by their scenic machineries – a question of theatricality, but also, if you will, of a sort of theatrical exchange: “golden age” to exile or decline in the story-worlds, lavish film to theatrical constraint in production. The first two sections take a specifically economic perspective on the original TV projects and their central storylines; the two final sections address how these storylines were locally woven by the revolving stage and the revolving auditorium used in the theatre productions. On various levels, a playfully “monetary” distinction of metonymy and metaphor is suggested in which metonymic contiguity stands for contextual prosperity (as experience, community, immediacy), metaphoric substitution for relative deprivation (as distance, abstraction, exchange).

New Brechtian Impulses in Contemporary Finnish Theatre: A Case Study of Juha Jokela’s Esitystalous (2010)

At the beginning of the 21st century, Finnish theatre experienced a wave of new, politically engaged drama that came hand in hand with a renewal of aesthetics and dramaturgical strategies. One component of this renewal was a new perspective on Brecht’s epic theatre, which was initiated by visits of Finnish theatre directors to theatre performances, for example, by Frank Castorf, in Germany. As a consequence of this, an interweavement of Brechtian aesthetics and Finnish theatre tradition became a trend on Finnish stages. One example of this is Juha Jokela’s Esitystalous (Performance Economy), which was premiered at Espoon Kaupunginteatteri in 2010. Here, Jokela uses Brechtian alienation effects to put the audience in the position of a critical observer. However, he does not dissolve the unity of actor and role, but sticks to the Finnish acting tradition, thereby creating his very own aesthetics of a new political theatre.

Alma Fohström: kansainvälinen primadonna (Finnish) [Alma Fohström: An International Prima Donna] by Svetlana Toivakka

Reviewed by: Alma Fohström: kansainvälinen primadonna (Finnish) [Alma Fohström: An International Prima Donna] by Svetlana Toivakka Matti Huttunen Translated by Dr. John Nelson Alma Fohström: kansainvälinen primadonna (Finnish) [Alma Fohström: An International Prima Donna]. By Svetlana Toivakka. Helsinki: [Helsingsfors Universitet], 2015. [311p. ISBN 978-951-51-0827-2. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/153609] The subject of Svetlana Toivakka’s doctoral thesis is one of Finland’s most successful international singers, the coloratura soprano Alma Fohström (1856–1936). Alma Fohström studied singing, among other subjects, in St. Petersburg, and while young first appeared in Helsinki on the stage of the Finnish Theatre, where in the 1870s they performed the opera classics. Her international career started in the Kroll Theatre in Berlin and continued after that on stages in Italy, London, Bucharest, Russia, South America, and the Baltic States. In the mid-1880s, Alma Fohström took part in a tour of the U.S. organised by the impresario Colonel Mapleson. The tour was not an unequivocal success but it is to be noted that Alma Fohström stood in as Adelina Patti’s replacement on the tour. Adelina Patti was undoubtedly the international singer that Alma Fohström was compared to, as were so many other sopranos at the turn of the nineteenth century. Later Alma Fohström took up teaching and was, for instance, a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire from 1909 to 1918; after leaving Russia as a result of the Revolution she continued as a professor at the Berlin Stern Conservatoire between 1920 and 1928. After this she continued to teach singing in Helsinki until her death. The use of a diverse range of source material covering many languages is one of the most notable aspects of Toivakka’s thesis. Her work is significant and even groundbreaking in bringing Russian sources into the study of Finnish music, which has traditionally focused on Nordic and Central European roots. Hopefully in the future, the results of this research will be made available to an international audience. An important material source has been the Alma Fohström album, housed in the National Library in Helsinki, which contains, among other items, concert programmes, drawings, and poems dedicated to Alma Fohström. This can be compared to many other similar albums of female singers of the period. Alma Fohström’s life and art is reconstructed in the thesis through letters and other archival material, photographs, newspaper and periodical reports, scores, textbooks—especially Alma Fohström’s teacher Henriette Nissen-Saloman’s Singing School of 1881—and some preserved recordings of Alma Fohström. Toivakka’s research adheres to the three current trends in Finnish musicology: microhistory, performance studies, and academic biography. Microhistory’s key and accepted premises (amongst others “exceptionally typical”) are supplemented by Lev Gumilev’s methodological ideas, which emphasise the cohesion between micro- and macrohistory. It has long been the case in Finland that biography is a feature of popular literature. In the last few years, however, [End Page 243] many biographical studies have been published which are, without doubt, academic in nature. Performance studies has been on the rise in Finland in the last twenty years and Toivakka’s research, in this respect, is firmly anchored in current musicological questions. Toivakka is supported by a number of new international studies that have focused on individual prima donnas or more broadly on the prima donna phenomenon. The prima donna concept and controversies are well covered in the text and the author has a solid understanding of singing history and opera literature. Adelina Patti was perhaps the most celebrated singer of her time and, as a prima donna, unique. Sometimes it seems that in Toivakka’s study Patti is too dominant and in some ways portrayed as the ideal prima donna type: Patti’s stature was dominant but, perhaps, because of her fame she was not a typical prima donna. The chosen emphases and chronological solutions in the thesis are in part bold and I missed a little more historical self-reflection, which would have clarified the direction of the study. It is recommended that the readers acquaint themselves with...

Language on the Stage – Questions of Identity and Ideology

Language used on the stage always bears certain connotations to the identity, ideology and morality of characters, theatre makers and audiences. In my article, I am going to analyse how minority languages have been used or represented in Finnish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian theatre though the lens of theatre history. Following books are investigated using content analysis method: The Dynamic World of Finnish Theatre (2006) by S. E. Wilmer and Pirkko Koski, Estonian Theatre (2003) by Jaak Rahesoo, Theatre in Latvia (2012, ed. by Guna Zeltiņa) and Lithuanian Theatre (2009, ed. by Gintaras Aleknonis and Helmutas Sabasevicius). Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are neighbouring countries that have faced diff erent political history: from rather independent Finland to the post- Soviet Baltic countries. Taking this into the consideration, one can detect the disquisition between bi-lingual (Finland, Latvia) and monolingual approaches (Estonia, Lithuania) to theatre history.

Anna Liisat: Maailman ja näyttämön muuttuva todellisuus

Anna Liisa’s Changing Realities of the World on Stage The article discusses the production history of Minna Canth’s last play, Anna Liisa (1895), and theatrical realism. Of all Canth’s plays Anna Liisa has enjoyed the most theatre productions; between 1895 and 2014 there were more than 70 performances in professional theatres in Finland. I demonstrate the different ways in which Canth’s Anna Liisa has been interpreted over the last 120 years. There seem to be three main traditions, and over the years the interpretative focus has changed from the community to the individual. The three traditions emphasise the religious, the social and the individual and are complementary rather than exclusive of one another. The play’s last scene in particular has been construed in widely differently ways. The premiere took place at the Finnish Theatre in Helsinki in 1895. The first productions interpreted the ending through Anna Liisa’s faith, a tradition that persisted until the early 1970s. Sakari Puurunen’s version at the Finnish National Theatre in 1972 marked a turning point. The production was celebrating the centennial of the Finnish Theatre, the predecessor of the Finnish National Theatre. It was the first production to focus on the social questions in the play, whose story involves a narrow-minded community following very strict norms of behaviour. Although Puurunen’s interpretation did not stress the play’s religious aspects, nevertheless the main character seemed to be the community rather than the individual. Only very recent interpretations, such as Tuija-Maija Niskanen’s television production (1988) and Mikko Roiha’s staging at the Vaasa Municipal Theatre (2003), have emphasised Anna Liisa’s personal experiences and memories, including her womanhood and sexuality. In these later productions Anna Liisa is seen as a woman, not as a young girl. Theatrical conventions have also changed. What is seen on stage is not the realistic milieu in which Anna Liisa and her community are living, but rather Anna Liisa’s inner world, her reality and how she perceives the world she lives in.

Finnish Theatre Photography and the Influence of Technology

This article is mainly based on interviews with three Finnish photographers’, Kari Hakli, Jalo Porkkala, and Petri Nuutinen’s as well as on the theatre photographs they have taken. The criterion for selecting these three photographers has been that their work spans a number of decades; therefore, the development of Finnish theatre photography can be studied from this perspective. The theatre photograph is a photo of the stage image, which is often based on the dramaturgy of the play script. The subjects and points of view of the photographer are not generally agreed on in advance with the director or the actors, but they are based on the photographer’s own estimations and views. He/she interprets and transmits the performance to the audience with his images, and works in between the theatre and the spectator, but he is not the artistic producer when photograph- ing, the performance is, i.e. he/she has not chosen lights, costumes or set design. Technology has had a significant influence on the theatrical image and pho- tographic equipment. With the development of materials and equipment, the making of theatre photographs has shifted from a static process into a more dynamic one. Finnish theatre photography has reacted quickly to aesthetic trends in both theatre and photography. In the past it was possible to photograph only static or slow-moving objects in a set situation or in a pose. Today, the photographer can move among the actors, photograph fast-moving objects with a handheld camera using the stage lighting without the need for additional lights. The images look more as if they have been taken by an insider, someone who belongs to the team, rather than by an intruder. Theatre photographs are nowadays needed in the same way they have always been needed, as documents of the performance.

Beyond pathos: Interview with Annika Tudeer

Abstract In this interview with Annika Tudeer, we pursue the question of possibility and the place of emotionality in contemporary theatre. At the forefront of the interview is the process-oriented practice of the Finnish theatre company OBLIVIA, which oriented itself very heavily around conceptual approaches of the 1970s through the 1990s but which in recent times has increasingly opened itself up by incorporating chance as a constructive principle for using affects and emotions as a medium of communication with the audience. In its more recent works, the company has allocated more room to that which one might call the pathos of acting. This serves a new performative aesthetics that endeavours to overcome the analytical approach to the theatre dispositive.

Hybrid third sector organizations in Finland – Arts and cultural institutions in focus

This article examines hybrid organizations in the field of culture. The main two objectives of the article are 1) to examine the differences between public theatre organizations and third sector theatre organizations and 2) to study hybrid theatres in relation to public and third sector organizations. Hybrid theatres are private as to their legal status, but under municipal control. First the theories and definitions of hybridity and the overlapping between sectors are summarized. Empirical examination includes 31 big and medium-sized professional Finnish theatre institutions. In the examination, clear differences between public and third sector organizations were found in their financing, personnel and cost structures. Generally speaking, mixed-owned hybrid theatres were closer to public theatres than to third sector organizations. The study also shows that hybrid form organizations challenge legal status based definitions and distinctions in use. Further analysis is needed in the future to provide a deeper and more comprehensive picture of the phenomenon.

Theatre translation as performance

In 2008, the Finnish National Theatre produced the Lebanese/Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s tragic play Incendies in Finnish. The advertisements, newspaper pre-reviews and reviews named Reita Lounatvuori, a well-known Finnish theatre translator, as the author of the translation. However, several other people were also involved in the translation process before Mouawad’s text reached the stage. In my article, I offer an empirical study of the process of translation of Incendies into Finnish to argue that translations in the theatre are not objects of art but products of art worlds, bearing the fingerprints of many subjectivities. To support my argument, I draw on Actor-Network Theory, as recently developed in the context of translation sociology (Buzelin 2007, 2005; Bogic 2010), and on Performance Studies, following Richard Schechner’s articulation of the concept of performance (Schechner 2013). I apply these models to the specific context of the theatre, the specific genre of drama, and the process of translating one play. This interdisciplinary exploratory study argues for the relevance of Schechner’s analytical model, and more broadly of Performance Studies, to the analysis of interlingual translation processes.